How to Use iPad’s iMovie Themes to Create Educational Videos

If you want to do more with your iPad education videos than just trim them, you’ll need the video editing capabilities of iMovie iPad app. iMovie for the iPad isn’t intended for heavy movie editing, but it does offer enough options to enable casual filmmakers to shoot video and edit it with some simple editing tools such as pre-made themes.

iMovie for iPad is a perfect tool for most video applications in education.

You begin your movie venture with a simple tap of the plus (+) icon on the bottom of iMovie’s opening marquee screen. The marquee screen is where you start a new project and access and share existing projects. A pop-up menu prompts you to start a new project from scratch or choose a new trailer from iMovie’s movie trailer themes.

From the iMovie home screen, tap the + sign and select New Trailer from the pop-up menu.

Movie trailers are theme templates that are already set up for your movie. Themes include elements such as a custom title screen design, transition effects, and theme music. All you need to do is customize the movie by inserting your content into the theme’s prearranged slots.

Preview the themes by tapping the Play button.

Tap a theme to preview it. Themes encompass popular movie categories such as Scary, Romance, Narrative, Retro, and Superhero. For example, if a student has written a suspenseful movie, he may select the Scary theme. It comes complete with a scary background track, titles, effects, and more. If a student is making a video for Biology or Geography, she might select the Expedition theme.

Tap the Outline tab, and tap in any text field to edit the Movie Name, Credits, and more.

Add content to the Storyboard text and Video wells.

Edit any title of a slide by tapping in the text field in the Storyboard and changing the text. The Storyboard also includes a number of Video wells to which you can add video. The placeholder image suggests what type of video to add (Action, Group, Closeup, and so forth). Tap any Video well and your available videos display in the video browser in the lower-right corner of your screen.

If the videos aren’t displaying, tap the Movie strip icon directly beneath the browser. Tap any video clip to highlight it and then tap the little blue arrow that pops up to add that video to the selected video well.

Tap any filled Video well to edit the video in it in the Video browser window. Turn on that video’s audio by tapping the volume control at the top right of the clip. You can select which portion of the video plays by tapping and dragging the video through the yellow selection outline in the browser window. Play your selected portion at any time by tapping the Play button.